Embrace Production as a first-class testing environment to decrease delivery costs and improve quality.

Is testing on (in) production a YOLO sign of lack of testing practices? Or a wise use of the best environment for a job?

Thorough testing before merging to master is still important, but it’s assumption-based. Staging on shared environments tends to be slow, unreliable, costly - and will still leave gaps to break our wheels on production. Why not just learn from the only true environment by conducting safe and efficient experiments?

Follow a journey of a well-intended “test it all thoroughly before releasing!” 🤓 engineer to a “can’t we test this on production?” 👹 provocateur.

Testing on production is often associated with A/B testing or canary releases, but those aren’t always the best - or even applicable - techniques. We’ll look instead at shadow and dry runs, controlled experiments, survival of the fittest; how to apply these techniques and what to be aware of.

Slides